Monday, October 26, 2015

Spirits Can Help Us By Reaching Across the Veil



Spirit is love and those on the other side can sometimes help us by reaching across the veil between life and death.  Please join me in this little video as I share three remarkable ghost stories at this time of Halloween.  These show how we can be helped by those who have died and who continue to give their love and protection to us while we are alive.

© Josephine Laing, 2015

Monday, October 19, 2015

♡ Cleaning Up Our Act ♡





Cleaning up your act is a lifelong task, isn't it?  Frank and I got started with this in our twenties.  After a fine rebellious rising up in our late teens and early college years, we discovered, as most do, the toll that the fast life can reap.  Dehydration and hangovers make poor test results both in the classroom and in life.  So, we started back then, finding the more moderate road.

Our thirties brought on some serious work and striving as we sought to meet our life goals.  This begged an even cleaner home base from which to draw our strength.  So, out went most of the toxins, found in commercial products: shampoos, cleansers, cosmetics, plastics and processed foods.  We also realized that natural fibers and home cooking gave us a sturdier base to launch and land from.

Our forties began the years of deep cleaning, to edge out the sludge of a lifetime's accumulation, not only mentally, by seriously rethinking who we are and how we wanted to be in the world, but also physically, regularly cleansing the internal organs through fasting and juicing, along with taking sabbaticals for inner renewal.

Then came our fifties, the decade that determines how the quality of your later life will be.  It's easy to drop the joys of physical exercise at this age and trade them in for a more restful and relaxing way of being, but it is so critical to step it up instead.  Dancing, gardening, swimming, biking, walking, whatever it is, our activities keeps us flexible and alive.  Enjoying regular movement holds that eventual downward pull toward the compost pile at bay for a few more decades.

Now that we are in our sixties, we see that slippery slope beginning to claim our peers.  The "Standard American Diet" (S.A.D.) of processed "food," lots of sweets and too many animal products along with sedentary days has been collecting it's toll.  So we are conscientiously upping the ante with exercise classes and time spent with friends recreating.  We've also gone nutritarian to compliment our periods of detoxification.  It's not servings, it's pounds of vegetables, fresh and raw along with berries and seeds for clean sugars and proteins each day. 

Recently we invested in a new super fast juicer.  Frank calls it, "The Kitchen Chipper," because it can juice and entire head of celery in about two seconds.  It only takes us five minutes to make our quart of breakfast juice and five minutes to clean and dry the machine.  So now, it is no big deal for us to make our green juice and consume our pounds of veggies every day.    

Chia seeds, sunflower seeds, a few almonds and walnuts go into our berry and herbal tea smoothies at lunchtime, so we have more than enough protein without burdening our kidneys and livers.  These delicious fresh drinks also provide tons of micro nutrients and complex combinations of bioflavonoids at a lower cost and with way more abundant bio-availability than stuff that comes in a bottle or a jar.

With this and some nice raw sauerkrauts, kimchis and other fermented foods, we hope to round the bend into our last three or four decades with the glow of our own "health care" rather than being subjected to prescribed disease management.  Wish us luck, as we continue to do our best and clean up our act year by year, decade by decade with love for our selves and for all.

© Josephine Laing, 2015

Monday, October 12, 2015

What Happens When We Die?



As we make our transition into death, we move into a limitless state of being, full of neutral compassion.  Our awareness broadens and we become one with everything.  Please enjoy this short video featuring a beautiful story of a lovely near death experience.

http://www.nderf.org/

© Josephine Laing, 2015

Monday, October 5, 2015

To Thine Own Self Be True





'To thine own self be true.'  Such a simple adage.  Not always easy to follow.

So often in life we find ourselves staying with what is familiar, long after it has grown cold.  Our habit mind dutifully helps us to hold fast while our awake self yearns to let go.  This can even happen with good things. 

I can remember a ceramics class that I was helping to teach.  It was a delight, but it kept on going long after the time when it was supposed to stop.  I felt conflicted and over burdened.  Though I enjoyed it, I was not truly staying in my joy.  I was beholden more to social duty than to my own true self.  These lessons can come hard.  And it's good to say "no," when it's time to let go.

In this particular scenario, Divine Arrangement intervened in the form of an automobile accident that put me where I needed to be, at home, tending within.  As rough as it began, it was there that I found my true joy again.  Nowadays, I like to think that I make these types of choices more frequently and on my own, when it is time to listen within, take stock and re-access.  It just seems so much more wise for me to do this before Divine Intervention sweeps in.

I am reminded of my mother's laundry soap, made from her fireplace wood ash and kitchen bacon grease, bubbling slowly on the stove.  With the flame of transformation beneath it, the two substances would begin to unite.  Over time, large bubbles would slowly rise up, thick and sticky.  Then with a sigh of release, they would pop and sink back down into the congealing, coalescing  mass.

Our creativity must rise, express itself and then return back down to the source in order to gather and rise again.  And just like the fat and ash, we become forever changed into something even more useful and new. 

It's okay for us to let go. When a part of our lives gets too high and tight and thin, be it an addiction, a commitment or an unresolved dream, it may be time for us to go back down.  Sometimes we just need to re-group in order to let ourselves take a little break, mix it up a bit and draw from what we know or have been before, in order to rise up and generate our own transformation once more.     



        Enjoy the lovely sunset photo by my friend Anno. 

© Josephine Laing, 2015